Photographers, graphic artists, and others desiring to capture an image of a scene, person, device, or event can use a device such as a still camera, a video camera, a web-cam, or the like to record the desired image. At times, the field of view of the captured image is too small, either too narrow (horizontal deficiency), too short (vertical deficiency), or both, for the photographer or user. The photographer can take two or more images while panning across the desired scene and can combine the multiple images into a composite image, or panorama, of the entire scene.
The resultant images can be cut and pasted together, whether manually, electronically, or digitally to combine the separate images or pictures into a single image. However, slight variations in the separate images can cause the cut and paste single image to appear as a mosaic instead of a contiguous, single image of the scene. The variations in the separate images can be the result of differences in projection angle and/or motion within the scene between the times the images were captured.
Various techniques have been proposed for blending images together to form a single image. One such method for blending overlapping images together utilizes Laplacian and Gaussian pyramids. An algorithm-based technique for blending overlapping images together can also be used.
Additional techniques have been disclosed that utilize both blending and warping to process images. For example, a blended image can be distorted with warping. Alternately, an image can first be morphed and then the colors of the warped image can be blended.